TLDR: BlackRock files for a Bitcoin Trust, Uniswap v4 is announced, EigenLayer goes live, Binance joins the Lightning Network, Maker DAI’s Savings Rate (DS) increases to 3.49%, Strike launches in Mexico.

Bitcoin Highlights of the Week

1. $10 trillion BlackRock officially files the 15th of June 2023 for spot Bitcoin Trust.”If approved, the Bitcoin ETF would open doors to a new wave of adoption and provide investors with an unprecedented opportunity”. - Nik Hoffman

2. Blackrock had silently expressed their interest for Bitcoin in a different manner in the previous quarter, as they increased their exposure to Microstrategy by 1.85% with a total of 598,092 shares worth $156 million.

3. Strike launches instant, cheap remittances to Mexico. It now allows users to send faster and cheaper cross-border payments from U.S. to phone numbers, debit cards and bank accounts in Mexico.

“In 2022 Mexico received a record $60 billion in remittances from the US alone, making up around 95% of total remittances received from abroad” - Strike release

4. Binance joins the lightning network with a 10 bitcoin channel with Kraken and 5 bitcoin channel with OKEX. The channels came from the same address of 50 bitcoin.(There is still a pending confirmation by Binance, but if its a troll, it might be a well capitalized one.)

5. Mutiny wallet, a Progressive Web Apps, gained popularity as Damus gets in trouble with Apple by allowing the Zap button (how users express their “likes” to other users with monetary value through bitcoin) to exists in the app without paying any dividends to them. We might see progressive apps get popular as they can’t be censored by Apple/Google, no download needed.

6. Michael Saylor’s keynote at Bitcoin Prague is out! In this talk he discusses the impact of monetary inflation on wealth preservation, the investment challenges we all face, the defects of various monetary instruments and why Bitcoin is the best global solution for those in the search of a store of value.

7. River released their report of Bitcoin vs the $156 Trillion Global Payment Industry, where it covers:

• What's happening in the cross-border payments industry.

• The under-discussed risks of CBDCs

• The number of Bitcoin users globally

• Who is using Bitcoin for payments

• How Bitcoin compares to other payment methods

• How to grow Bitcoin adoption & More

8. Bitcoin development nonprofit, Brink, has received a significant financial boost with a pledge of $5 million from Jack Dorsey's #startsmall organization. The pledge, totaling $1 million per year for the next five years, aims to support Brink's efforts in funding Bitcoin developers and ensuring the long-term sustainability of Bitcoin's core codebase.

9. Formosa went public on the illustrious Toptal Engineering blog. Formosa enhances crypto wallet management by leveraging easy-to-remember, themed security sentences rather than traditional and disparate recovery keywords.

10. Brinana, a forbes writer, posted an article on Nostr and shared how she received “zaps” from 47 people, earning 65100 sats. Bitcoin and Nostr are allowing content creators to work under the value for value model and to keep 100% of the contributions. Something that can’t be done in either: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Patreon, or even OnlyFans.

Ethereum Highlights of the Week

Dencun (Cancun + Deneb) upgrade

• Latest all core devs – consensus (ACDC) call video. Notes from Christine Kim:

  • Deneb scope: EIP7044 (perpetually valid signed voluntary exits) & EIP4788 (beacon root in EVM); considered for inclusion: EIP7045 (increase max attestation inclusion slot) & EIP6988 (prevent slashed validator being elected block proposer)

  • Discussion on reorgs increasing and proposal to change sub-slot timing for block production, attestation & aggregation

  • Discussion on staking with more than 32 ETH per validator

• EIP4844:

  • Latest EIP4844 implementer call video. Notes from Terence 

  • Dankrad’s additional testing to size blobs per block

  • EIP4844 devnet 6 launched

  • KZG ceremony has over 110k contributions, lobby is empty

• Consensus-specs v1.4.0-alpha.3: patch to increase BLOB_SIDECAR_SUBNET_COUNT to 6

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